Things that I like that are actually rubbish: D&D

 Content warning: swears, ranting

So D&D. It’s great. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson practically invented a hobby with it. And also greatly inspired another hobby - video games. It brings socially awkward people like myself out of their shells. You get to roll lots of funny looking dice. Brilliant.

But it is rubbish. I mean, it’s a bit like shooting a fish in a barrel but let’s get it out of the way.

Your favourite edition of D&D is rubbish. My favourite edition of D&D is rubbish. Our least favourite editions of D&D are rubbish. And that retro-clone over there is rubbish too. And that re-imagining rule set is probably rubbish too.

Armour class: rubbish

Hit points: rubbish

Unarmed combat rules… terrible, utter dog-crap, rubbish

hardly ever getting to use a D12: rubbish.

Loads of mostly identical humanoid monsters except with slightly different hit points: rubbish.

Players books that are mostly just lists of spells and powers you will never use: rubbish.

DM guides that are mostly just a list of magic items you will never use: rubbish.

Let’s face it, the only D&D books that were likely to get the majority of the content used were the old Basic sets covering levels 1-3. And even they had spells nobody ever used - come on how many times have you cast Hold Portal?

Old D&D was rubbish with all it’s fuck you rules - you’ve been poisoned, you’re dead; you’ve been paralysed and you can’t do anything for an hour; you’ve finally gained a level but now you’ve been energy drained, tough shit. Oh and if you are a women your weak. And if your a Demi-human your much better than a human except if you get to high level, which nobody ever does. And loads of it is needlessly racist.

Newer versions are rubbish because you actively have to try to die and all the monsters have so many hit points they take ages to die without being challenging. And most adventures are just rooms of monsters that attack you. Also, the only way you were expected to play is to walk through a dungeon fighting stronger things*

3/3.5 D&D was rubbish with its 5 billion character options that are mostly shite, its monster stats that are 5 pages long, it’s pointless being anything other than a spell-caster, you spend 3 hours trying to work out how to move your character.

4e was rubbish because nobody wanted to play it and you needed an app to make the character.

5th edition just gives up trying to make sense, has no rules for exploring, doesn’t tell you how to make an adventure, the absolute worst official adventures.  And new 5th edition doubles down on that.

And the Tomb of Horrors. Absolutely the worst type of DMs are trying to beat the Players, let’s cheat to make sure your spells don’t work, kind of bullshit design. Utterly rubbish so let’s rerelease it every 5 years.

Still owlbears are pretty good.

* the dungeon may be in fact a house, city, castle or even a forest but it’s basically all just a dungeon. Ok 4th edition was meant to be different I think, but I never played it at high level.

Vampires: the blathering

 Inspired by a comment from The Guvnor on The Gaming Tavern, I’ve been thinking about Ravenloft and The Known World aka Mystara. Although this post then rambles off in a totally different direction. Probably too much caffeine.

There are two regions in the known world where Vampires are said to be prevalent - Glantri and Karameikos. 

In both cases, the vampires seem to have been introduced in the Gazetteers. Glantri didn’t seem to have much in the way of a description before then, apart from Castle Amber and the odd mention in other modules.

However, a province ruled by vampires fits as part of the country and indeed you could easily set Curse of Strahd there with only minor tweaking.

Karameikos on the other hand is an odd beast. Vampires fit in quite well with the cod-eastern-european culture. But very few published adventures set in the country have them. There’s everybody’s favourite Goth Hobgoblin*, King Vlack in Nights Dark Terror. There may be actual vampires in other adventures but on the whole Karameikos is a bit of a low-level adventurer place for tangling with Vampires. Lycanthropes, there’s loads of, right from the original description of Threshold. vampires, not so much.

So what’s the point of this blog then? I don’t know. Except… maybe there could be a better Known World!

There are strong thematic links between Glantri and Karameikos… but they are nowhere near each other. So in a better known world they would be much closer. 

Glantri also has similarities to Darokin so that would be nearby. That’s is the Byzantine empire so that could be the other way. Just get rid of all the slavery stuff *shudder*. Ylarum and Ethangar would be beyond that.

Hmmm, so basically, I’ve come up with a plan to just put all these places in medieval Europe. Averoigne could actually be part of the known world** and all the racist bits could be lost in translation.

So anyway, I seem to have started a new series of posts on the theme: things that I like that are actually rubbish.

* go on name another 

** the known world needs more weird horror.